"Our Class" is Still Teaching Valuable Lessons

It somehow slipped my mind that Tuesday night was the opening night for CSC’s presentation of Our Class, the searing saga of a group of Poles and Jews who grew up together in a rural Polish town only to have their bonds savagely broken when the Nazis invaded Poland. But I caught on after spotting all the celebrities in the audience. The director Michael Greif walked by my friend Jessie and me on the way to his seat. The actor Bill Irwin sat in the row right in front of us. And in back of us sat Tony Goldwyn, perhaps still best known for playing the U.S. president in the TV show “Scandal” but playing a supporting role that night as he cheered on his daughter Tess, one of the three women in the play’s 10-member cast.

I saw the show when it played at BAM earlier this year and reviewed it along with some other Holocaust-related shows. This encore presentation has made a few adjustments to fit into a smaller playing space but the entire original cast is back and the play remains just as moving—and sadly relevant—as it was the first time around. So below is an encore of my review: 

Tadeusz Slobodzianek, the Polish author of "Our Class," and his inventive director Igor Golyak have turned their production from what could have been a fairly predictable story into a powerful meditation on how people act when faced with making truly horrendous choices.

At the center of their tale are 10 people who take great pride in being members of the same class in their village school. Half of them are Jewish, half Catholic and although they’re aware of their differences, it doesn’t stop them from developing friendships and crushes across faith lines. Until the outside world intervenes. 

First the Russians occupy the town and then the Germans take over. Locals take sides that break down along ethnic lines and soon they are informing on one another and beating and raping and killing one another. 

The script, adapted into English by Norman Allen, follows these characters over seven decades from their grade school years into their days in nursing homes for the few who survive that long. And yet it manages to make us feel as though we know each of them as real people who are good in some moments, horrible in others and sometimes just trying to make peace with what’s been done to them and what they’ve done to others. 

Most of the action is portrayed in an expressionistic style on a nearly bare stage outfitted with ladders, trap doors and a fateful chalkboard. And Golyak sometimes uses video cameras in the way that Ivo van Hove does to create film-style close-ups of his actors, which can be effective but can also be distracting. However he also creates achingly beautiful stage images as when the actors draw simple faces on white balloons and then send them floating into the rafters to symbolize the deaths in a particularly horrific massacre.  

The cast made up of both fresh and familiar faces is uniformly excellent. But I couldn’t help focusing on Richard Topol. That’s in part because he’s older by several years than most of his castmates. But it’s also because this is the third time I’ve seen Topol appearing in one of these recent Holocaust plays. 

He has a full career doing other things as well, but I suspect that Topol, who traces his family roots back to shtetls in Eastern Europe, keeps taking these parts because he truly believes—as we all should—that unless we acknowledge such history, we are in dire danger of repeating it.

A few people I've talked to since seeing the show at CSC have griped that the stagecraft overwhelms the storytelling, particularly in the smaller space. But my feelings still stand and I still think that if you haven’t yet seen Our Class, you should. And if, like me, you saw it and liked it before, I think you'll appreciate it all over again.

Meanwhile I’m looking forward to seeing what the Ukrainian-born Golyak does with The Merchant of Venice, which is scheduled to open at CSC in November, with Topol as the put-upon Jew Shylock. He'll be joined by some of his current castmates in that production of Shakespeare’s even earlier indictment of racial bigotry.